SSHS Record Broken at Top 10

MISSOULA - Seeley-Swan was well represented at the prestigious Russ Pilcher Top 10 meet April 24 with more than a half dozen Blackhawks and Lady Blackhawks receiving invites. To make the cut, athletes had to rank in the top ten from Western Montana schools across all classes.

The Boy's 4X400-meter relay team set a new Seeley-Swan High School record with their blazing fast time of 3:28.40 minutes. This also qualified them for state. The team, consisting of Logan Robinson, Hunter Shelmerdine, Dakota Wood and Logan Maughan took second place to Glacier at the Top 10.

Blackhawks Coach Mike Haines said the stiff competition made for the perfect environment to excel and he expected the Boys to do well. At minimum he felt the team would qualify for state.

Haines said Robinson ran a phenomenal first leg. Haines felt the great start built the rest of the team's confidence and everyone stepped up and ran extremely well. Wood confirmed it saying that when Robinson came around the corner leading all the AA schools and Corvallis he knew he had to give it his all.

"We wanted to beat Corvallis really bad. They've beat us every time we raced against them until then and [we] blew them out of the water," said Wood.

Maughan explained that the competition at the Top 10 is the toughest they face until the state meet. Tough competition only makes them faster.

Currently the Boys have the fastest time in Montana Class C and are the only Class C team prequalified for state, beating the qualifying standard by more than six seconds. They have the third fastest in the state across all classes behind Glacier and Billings West. Less than two seconds separates the top three teams.

For Shelmerdine, breaking the record didn't really set in until he was on the bus coming home. The next day, seeing the previous record on the record board in the school lunchroom really drove home the accomplishment. They had shaved a second and a half off the record set by Jesse Kessler, Jason Mudrow, Aaron Morse and Derek Hard in 2007.

"It felt really good [breaking the record]. At the beginning of the year our goal wasn't really that, so when we got it, it was really big," said Robinson.

Robinson added that there is a couple of weeks left in the season for them to get even faster. Shelmerdine said the next record they can take aim at is the state Class C record of 3:24 set in 2016 by Ennis.

In other events, Shelmerdine took sixth in the 400-meter with a new personal record of 52.11 seconds. Robinson took seventh in the 200.

For the Lady Blackhawks, Terra Bertsch jumped 4 feet 11 inches for sixth place in the high jump and Klaire Kovatch threw discus just short of 120 feet for seventh place.

 

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